Ute's and Roger's comments
Dear friends, Thanks for sending the discussion paper for the NMM research project. We are very enthusiastic about this common project and are looking forward to see what will come of it in Istanbul later this month and ultimately in Zurich in 2010. That said we would like to register a few comments on the paper itself. We have read the document from two perspectives: 1) as a genuine INURA product, a paper that takes up typical INURA themes and topics and argues in line with earlier joint and individual discussions; 2) as a possible contribution to a journal. More precisely, the NMM paper as a potential entry for a new section in IJURR called Urban Worlds (please find attached the description of this section for your information). Both perspectives hold any paper to a very high standard. The INURA perspective points towards a particular relationship of research to practice/action/praxis. And the Urban Worlds perspective points towards international compatibility and contemporary theoretical debate in urban and regional studies. We found the paper overall very interesting. We think we understand its purpose, and are fond of its intentions. That said, we believe the paper might need to be strengthened in order to be more effective. The most important point that needs addressing, it seems, is the rather unproductive cultural bias towards (cozy) downtown life and the palpable hatred for the suburbs. This makes the paper a bit parochial politically as the urban world has really become sub''urban. It reflects a view of the city (reduced to an inner city, really) from a European perspective and gives it a positive connotation, while the suburbs are presented as if everyone still lived in the segregated, monotonous and white 1950s suburbs of the US. This can’t be upheld. Neither from a European nor from a North American, let along from a global perspective! Suburbs are often more diverse, more lively, more urban than the inner cities they surround. Those inner cities have become Disneyfied artificial consumption spaces for tourism and entertainment and cleansed spaces for capital accumulation. Looking at the suburbs of Los Angeles, Toronto or Montpellier, for example, places we now know reasonably well, and particularly at the interesting in-between spaces they produce rapidly, we cannot follow your rather conservative dichotomy of inner city and suburb as presented in this paper. This disagreement has ontological, research-strategic and political consequences we would like to discuss with you in Istanbul and Zurich and any time in-between. Beyond this core point, our unease with the paper can be registered along three lines in particular: 1) it is Euro-centric; 2) it doesn’t reflect the intellectual heritage of INURA sufficiently and 3) it does not sufficiently engage with existing literatures on urban and regional (metropolitan) developments. We will expand on these three points a little more below and will then go through the paper step by step. #'Euro-centrism'. The paper is written from a European standpoint. There is nothing wrong with this but it means that much, in fact most experiences of urbanization today are very marginal in the analysis. We are not concerned here with issues of colonialism, post-colonialism, etc. That is a different debate. What concerns us are the assumptions about “urbanity” that underlie the analysis as presented from the second paragraph onward. The idea of attractiveness and urbanity, publicness and urban culture, and even of an “new renaissance” seems to emerge from a very limited view of urban life in a very limited urban universe. #'INURA Intellectual Heritage': A paper of this sort may want to acknowledge a bit more explicitly the work INURA members have actually done over time with respect to the NMM. This could be either an inductive exercise, in the sense that you would look a little more closely at the work done by our members and to see what it adds up to; or you could do this deductively: see if your thesis holds by engaging with what INURA members have done in their scholarly and activist work. At a minimum, you may want to acknowledge another such manifesto-style paper: The Inura declaration in IJURR 2003. But you could also spend a bit more time reflecting critically about how the metro mainstream has evolved since we all noticed that each of us has an incinerator problem back in Salecina. #'Silences'.' The paper has huge silences. It focuses on issues such as gentrification and creativity but has very little to say about other topics that have been centrally important to the understanding of cities today: sustainability, urban political ecology, urban health, infrastructure and transportation, criminalization, work, homelessness etc. Of course, nobody would expect you to cover all these but the ones you chose present an unfortunate narrowing of perspectives. '''Here are some detailed comments: p.2, second para: the development is not Janus-faced; it is rather multi-facetted. To pose today’s urban reality in a two-dimensional way is perhaps not helpful. p.2, “urbanity”; a very European concept. Not sure what it means outside of Europe. Also, urbanity is not measurable, it is not an object or subject that can be “improved”; urbanity has ideological components which have been mostly absorbed by neoliberalism; but it also has difficult moments. “Improvement” of urbanity is always a partial concept. Whose urbanity? Isn’t it a bourgeois concept to begin with? p.2 third para: “These tendencies strongly influence urban policies all over the world” – and vice versa: These “tendencies” are not in existence outside of cities and then influence urban policies. To the contrary: urban policies/politics have produced and influenced these tendencies. There is much work here on the role of local politics/governance in the production of disparities, inequities, gentrification, etc. This needs to be acknowledged. p.2, third para: most of the developments listed in this paragraph are not new. They have been going on for a while; what is new about them now? Just that they add up to the NMM? Or are there aspects that are really new? p.2, third para: qualified labour: not sure if this is the right word: do you mean highly skilled? p.2, fourth para: “The NMM has important impacts on urban development and everyday life”: Can a thing really have impact? Should one not identify actors who have an impact? Is this a process without a subject? p.2, fourth para, line 2: alignment: do you mean “convergence”? p.3, first para: “reacting on these changes” à “reacting to these changes” p.3, middle para: you claim that the logic of this process can only be understood in historical perspective. Yes, but isn’t that true of all logic? Nothing reveals itself without historical perspective. The question is: WHOSE historical perspective reveals WHAT logic? In fact, your historical narrative is very standard, not to say “mainstream”. This is where your paper is most Euro-centric. The history you are proposing here talks about western cities but you present those developments as universal. The treatment of suburbanization here (as elsewhere in the paper) is stereotypical. The entire second paragraph from the bottom is rather weak and full of unquestioned truisms (Allerweltsweisheiten). Who is asking the questions that follow at the bottom of the page? Are these your questions? Did the general public ask these questions? Are they rhetorical questions? Is Richard Florida asking these questions? p.4, top: Your treatment of the banlieues (do you mean the French ones in particular? If so, why do you single them out?) and suburbs is very prejudicial. What, you ask, do people do in their leisure time? Well, they probably watch television, join sports clubs, barbecue, drive to the mall, etc. Who says they are missing the inner city? This seems to be a very bourgeois prejudice against the burbs. And what does “boring” mean? By whose standards? p.4 third and fourth para: the recurrence to Jacobs, Mitscherlich and the Situationists seems random and rather selective. There have been many more voices who have dealt with the urban contradictions you want to describe. Sure, this section is about historical perspective but don’t we know much more about the inner cities and the suburbs than those people did? And haven’t we accepted that the class-based and cultural prejudices of Jacobs, Mitscherlich and even the Situationists were themselves problematic? What are these “urban qualities” you are referring to? Are the suburbs just empty space? Are the suburbanites people with no lives? That certainly cannot be upheld today, can it? p.4 bottom para: “side by side” à better: “hand in hand” p.5, first big para: why not cite Hitz et al 1995 here? This would be an example of how your paper does not make use of enough of our own work. Also, you point to the criticism leveled against global city theory but, unfortunately, this paper has the same flaws: focus on the west, on headquarter economies (i.e. inner cities) etc. You are not actually drawing any lessons from the deficits of global city theory. Why mention them, then? The idea that the cities in the global South have been influenced by developments in the North needs to be considered in light of what authors like Jenny Robinson (Ordinary Cities) or Ananya Roy (The 21st Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory, Regional Studies 2007) have been writing about these issues. It is here, where your paper needs to be much better connected to the theoretical debates going on in urban studies at the moment. (this is where you should engage for an Urban Worlds piece for IJURR if you like). p.5 bottom para: Alongside instead of side by side “The typical Fordist model” à which INURA countries were really Fordist? Certainly not Greece as we learned last year, not Turkey, perhaps not even Switzerland, if one believes Lipietz… Here you are making all kinds of assumptions about the world which are highly specific to very few countries and regions. Is this a Zurich perspective? If so, you must say so but then you may not want to make claims about what is “typical” or “classical”. You also make assumptions about “inner cities” and social polarization that can only be upheld for certain places. Toronto, for example, shows different tendencies; the outward movement of “middle classes” is also not happening. Yes, young families still move to the suburbs but for opposite reasons: because housing is cheap there. This needs rethinking, rephrasing if you want this to be a more general paper about the NMM. p.6 top para: sounds like public choice theory to me? You may want to rethink this rather conservative argument about the city as a supermarket p.6 second para: what is the lifestyle of suburbia in 2009? What does ‘uniting all those people’ mean? Who says suburbia is more segregated than the inner city? Perhaps in Zug (just read an article about that in the Tagesanzeiger todayJ) but certainly not in Toronto. This needs to be revised. p.6, third para: this would need a more differentiated analysis; see for example the paper by Ananya Roy which has a much more sophisticated perspective on these matters. p.6 bottom: urban renewal is a very dated and useless concept. It is very much associated with the policies of the US government in the 1960s. And why a lecture on Ruth Glass etc.? Doesn’t everyone who likely will read this paper know what the history of gentrification is? p.7 middle para: All these things are now strongly supported by local state action and policies. p.7 bottom para: this discussion is not up-to-date: see newer work by Tom Slater, for example. p.8/9: this section is rather uncritical and doesn’t at all show the cracks in the mirror of creativity p.9 third para: “With these tendencies…” awkward sentence structure p.9 fourth para: the global cities as lighthouse is very unfortunate and is in opposition to what we have always said about the regional base of global cities to which the suburbs belong (see Keil Ronneberger on this or even Sassen) p.9 fifth para: Hard to see the difference between what you are describing here and what the Stadtbürgertum did in previous decades p.9 sixth para: “massive distribution” not a good term p.10 top: what is this obsession with boredom? What kind of category is that? Besides, ennui is a wonderful thing:) Why Koolhaas? Not very convincing. p.10 third para: You may want to make reference to the literature on fast policy transfer (Peck and Theodore) here. p. 10 fourth para: you are citing a twenty year old Harvey paper as reference for the NMM? There must be more up-to-date sources that you might be able to use, no? p.11 bottom: Frankfurt actually had its skyline in the 1960s. The 1980s was an addition. This whole discussion on skylines doesn’t sound very sophisticated. The same is true for the para on landmarks and festivals on page 12, which sounds quite trivial. p.12/13 the section on the commodification of the urban is good but also nothing new. But it could be the main idea around which you revise this paper. p.14 repressive tolerance?? Don’t we have more current terminology? Also, this term was so clearly connected to the Fordist-Democratic-Keynesian experience in the US that it may not be the best term to use in a paper on (post)neoliberalism (which is what the NMM really is). p.14 first para: the ideas about politics here are very Eurocentric p.15, middle para: The para that starts with For Lefebvre is very good!